I’ve made a video of my portfolio specializing in creative and unique brand identity, take a look!
https://lnkd.in/exYpJWn
Thanks,
Caren

Hi I’m Caren Bordowitz it’s this is my YouTube portfolio.

It’s hard to put decades of work into 10 minutes, so this is just the highlights. Let’s get started!

I’ll start with the most recent my experience: designing for events as well as working them, started when a prominent event planner reached out to me to design a “Thank You to our Sponsor” sign.

My role expanded from just the thank-you signage to other collateral materials like badges, banners, booth design, program booklets, PowerPoint app art, award banners and things of all shapes and sizes. One year it came to pass the they needed someone at an event in Las Vegas to work the booth as a tech expert and I went not in the role of a graphic designer but in a different kind of role helping people with tech. And I just loved it! I was bitten by the bug and I started doing more events working with terrific clients and other tech experts. Sometimes my role was working the tech bar and sometimes it was the registration desk or as an event helper checking the banquet orders and such.

The last time event I did was in Chicago in February 2020. Then Covid 19 hit. The shelter in place order way went into place and I lost the main source of my income. While I’m confident that the people in event planning are optimistic and resilient… there’s events to come, events to plan in the future, but at the same time I’m trying to build up my graphic design business.

Before working in event planning industry I was working at a university in the University Relations Department, which is like public relations of for University. I designed a lot of materials for recruitment and fundraising and a lot of view books that are sent out to high school students to give them a first look at the University before visiting the campus and a lot of the matching collateral materials like postcard the smaller booklets specific to each college at the university. Also I was doing some outdoor advertising such as billboards taxi toppers and even bus wraps. I did a calendar that featured the canine mascot of the university. That was fun going around for photoshoots with the dog.

Before the university I was working for a company that sold and manufactured cables and connectors. I did a variety have worked for them starting with redesigning their logo. They had a dated look and I wanted them to have a more modern logo that was well suited for a wider variety of applications. I also worked on their catalogue. There were 180 pages with so much product to shoot. I would do the shooting and bring them into Photoshop and silhouette the images and retouch when necessary and design the catalogue. This catalogue was featured in catalog success magazine. The magazine favorably compared the catalog to Google in its ease of search.

Before that I freelanced for a number of places including an ad agency. I did a lot of heavy photo retouching of jewelry. We did lots of different catalogs for jewelry and garden equipment. To do jewelry you have to get a good shine out of metal and gems and that means a strong contrast of lights and darks. The silhouettes have to be very finely done. I enjoyed giving the jewelry very long dramatic foot shadows. All done in Photoshop and then brought into InDesign where the actual layout of the catalogs and brochures was done.

Before that I had been working many years ago for Toys R Us. Working for Toys R Us was a delight. Some of my outstanding achievements there: I won an award for one of my ads. I won an ad Q Award for the baby registry. A couple of my other concepts the Christmas catalog cover I design brought the “hot sales” toys items into the illustrated world of Geoffrey the giraffe in a Santa bag over his shoulder. Another catalog covered that my concept was chosen from was the spring catalog where in reverse Geoffrey the giraffe was brought into real life photography interacting with the child who is skating. I also did a couple of annual reports. One the concept was illustrations used for graphs. One of my very successful designs was a shopping bag. I designed the bag almost like Andy Warhol with different squares of different colors using Geoffrey’s head.

I was freelancing for a food service. In some ways it stretched my skill set because I was doing food photography some illustration and animation for social media. I came up with fun characters and did posters for different food events, like breakfast for dinner and potato bar and luau for example.

The programs that I use are the Adobe suite, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, and InDesign. I’ve also got experience doing video editing and animation in Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects. Well you made it to the end of my online portfolio video.

Thank you for watching. If you like what you see, you can subscribe to my channel. I try to put out videos every Saturday. If you want to reach me to do some graphic design work you can reach me at Caren@carendesign.net you can also look at my online portfolio at CarenDesign.net. I’m going to put a part at the end with all the testimonials of people that I’ve worked for over the years. Thank you for watching! Bye bye!